Call and Answer
by Lys ap Adin
Summary: For reasons known only to himself, Jean's always the one Eren calls. Eren and Jean, smut, contemporary AU.


**Title:** Call and Answer  
**Characters/Pairings:** Eren and Jean  
**Summary:** For reasons known only to himself, Jean's always the one Eren calls.  
**Notes:** Adult for smut; generic modern-day professional adults AU (like Jean is a hedge fund manager kind of a thing). Canon character death (sorry, Marco, sucks to be you). Beware of feels; Eren's messed up and apparently determined to take Jean down with him.

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**Call and Answer**

Eren calls him at a quarter of twelve, forty-five minutes after Jean switches his bedside lamp off and maybe twenty minutes after he falls asleep. Jean doesn't have to check the display to see who it is, even though it's just the default chime and not the custom ringtone he set for Eren. There's only one custom ringtone set for the entirety of Jean's contact list, and it's Eren's: whenever Eren sees fit to drunk dial him, attempt to prank him, or demand Jean's assistance in the matter of bail, Denis Leary heralds it by braying that he's an asshole. Jean has yet to stop enjoying this, even though he's programmed it into six different phones by now, a chain stretching all the way back to high school. Jean knows it's Eren because there is exactly one person he knows who still calls him this late. Everyone else in his social circle has already fallen prey to the phenomenon of the late twenties, the one where partying till two or three in the morning and then getting up to go to work with a drunken hangover starts to lose its attractions.

Not to mention the fact that Jean has most of the city precincts and the county jail listed in his contacts these days, also because of Eren.

Jean closes his eyes against the glare of his phone's screen, groping for it and then the lamp as he answers. "Yeah, what is it?" Polite manners are for other people, not assholes like Eren Jaeger.

"Hey, Kirschstein." Eren's voice is rough, his vowels lazy and rounded, but only moderately so. He's probably not drunk; Jean only wishes this were a good sign. "You busy right now?"

Jean throws the blankets off and sits up. He scrubs his free hand over his face. "I was _asleep_, asshole."

"So that's a no," Eren concludes. "Great. You wanna come down to the 17th and pick me up?"

"Fuck, no." Jean fishes a mostly clean pair of jeans out of the hamper and starts pulling them on. It's a tragic commentary on his life that he can do this one-handed and holding a phone to his ear. "What the hell did you do this time, Jaeger?"

Eren laughs; it echoes down the line, cheerful. Jean also wishes that _this_ were a good sign. "I didn't _do_ anything. I am _alleged_ to have been drunk and disorderly and also to have split my knuckles on a guy's jaw."

Jean stuffs his bare feet into his sneakers and grimaces. Should've guessed that one, probably. "Oh, allegedly. Right." It's even odds whether Eren picked that one up from Armin (3L at Yale and top of his class) or just from hearing it so many times from various public defenders.

"Right. Oh, hey, bring some money," Eren tells him. "I'm broke. See you soon." He hangs up with no more ceremony than that, the asshole.

Jean swears and stuffs his phone into his pocket, throws a shirt on, and grabs his wallet and keys on the way out the door. Fucking Eren, fucking Eren and his fucking assumption that someone will always be there to pick up his fucking messes. Why the fuck hasn't he grown the fuck up like the rest of them? It's like the guy's permanently stuck at the mental age of fifteen. (Jean carefully avoids thinking about why that might be, even as he rants to himself for the entire drive downtown. He knows as well as anyone else why Eren Jaeger never quite caught up with the rest of them, why he might not ever be able to do it.) "This is the last time I'm ever going to do this," he promises his steering when he's parked in front of the 17th precinct station. He's said as much before. "I mean it this time." He's said _that_ before, too, and Jean is sneakingly certain that it's not going to stick any better for repeating it.

By this point, Jean's familiar with the routine: he forks over the money to spring Eren from lock-up and signs on the dotted line, and he takes charge of the plastic baggy of Eren's effects while the cop staffing the front desk calls back to have Eren brought out. This time the pickings are slim, consisting only of Eren's battered wallet, a cheap pink plastic lighter, and a half-full pack of cigarettes. No keys, which means that Eren has either lost them or is couch-surfing again. No knife, either, and no mention of it in the paperwork, which is one less charge to worry about, thank goodness.

Eren's a mess when his cop escort brings him up; there's gauze wrapped around his knuckles, spotted in a couple of places with dried blood, and he has a split lip and the beginnings of a righteous shiner. He's grinning, his every step light and springy, and his eyes are bright. Yeah, that's just about what Jean had figured he'd see after their brief conversation. Jean makes a face at Eren's cheerful greeting ("Yo, Kirschstein, took you long enough!") and shoves the baggy into his chest the second the cops turn him loose. "C'mon."

Sometimes his gruffness is the only spark Eren's temper needs to set it off, but tonight isn't going to be one of those occasions. Eren grins some more and saunters out of the station with him, insouciant to his very bones, and slides into the passenger seat of Jean's car like it's his due. "What crawled up your ass and died?"

"Gee, I wonder. Fasten your goddamn seatbelt." Eren chooses not to fight him on that score—this time—and once he's complied, Jean puts his car in gear. "The hell were you fighting about this time?"

Eren slouches in his seat and puts his feet up on the dash; he ignores Jean's snarl of outrage. He seems to be thinking about the question; the on-again, off-again flash of the streetlamps illuminates his furrowed brow in flashes. Eventually he says, "I dunno. Must have been something."

It's a silent drive after that; Jean doesn't see any point in encouraging Eren's behavior by responding to him. Mercifully, Eren doesn't push it. He's not drunk anymore, if he even was to begin with—Jean has seen Eren drunk and right now he's not even buzzed—but that doesn't mean anything. Eren picks fights as naturally as breathing, throws himself into them with savage glee, and he doesn't ever seem to need a reason for it. Once Marco had said it was because fighting was the only way Eren could see to give the universe itself a black eye. Sometimes Jean believes he was right, and sometimes he thinks Eren fights because it's just in him to fight. Because it's his bad luck that he doesn't have anything to fight for. His bad luck to be born out of his proper time, without a war to fight. Either way, for their senior yearbook, they'd all of them voted Eren the one most likely to live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. (Eren had embraced his title; Jean still thinks he was inordinately disappointed when Marco inadvertently stole it from him.)

Maybe he's a sucker—hah, there's no _maybe_ about it, he's definitely a sucker—but Jean doesn't ask where he can drop Eren off. He drives him straight back to his condo instead. Doing anything else would just mean getting another phone call in a few hours. Jean only wishes that were conjecture and not an assumption grounded in experience, but he knows better by now. If he lets Eren stay the night, at least he stands a chance of getting _some_ sleep before his alarm goes off.

Fucking Eren just takes it as a given, lets himself out of Jean's car, and ambles up to his front door like it's the most natural thing in the world for him to do. Out of the clear blue, he announces, "I'll have money again on Friday," as Jean's letting them in. By which he means that Mikasa will be passing on his allowance come Friday; the smartest thing Eren Jaeger has ever done was give the insurance settlement to Armin for investing and let Mikasa dole out portions of it as needed. "Pay you back then."

"You'd better believe you will. I'm not made of money, asshole." Though that's not strictly fair; Eren always pays his debts.

Eren sweeps a look around Jean's living room and snorts. "Sure you're not."

That's not cool. Jean's worked damn hard to earn this and Eren knows it. "Fuck you, Jaeger."

Eren grins at him. "Well, all right." The next thing Jean knows is that his back is against the door and Eren's tongue is in his mouth. He's not actually as sneaky as he thinks he is—Jean wants to sleep tonight, and therefore he has no compunctions about handing Eren an opening like that. It ought to let him work out the rest of his wild mood. After that, with any luck at all, Jean will manage to grab at least three or four hours of sleep.

He drops his hands to Eren's hips and slides a knee between Eren's so he can drag him up tight against his thigh. Eren growls against his mouth, a sound that's feral. Jean really wishes his dick wasn't conditioned to respond to the particular harmonics of that sound, but the sad truth is that it is. He rocks his thigh against Eren's crotch, grinding against the bulge of it until Eren growls again and bites his lip, hard enough to hurt. "C'mon, Kirschstein," he says.

It's as good as a prearranged signal; Jean lets Eren slide back down his leg and they head for his bedroom, leaving a trail of clothes as they go. Jean's pretty sure that means they've done this too often, but he can't quite bring himself to care about that just now, not with his dick hanging heavy and hard between his thighs as he follows Eren to bed. He's not even all that surprised when Eren turns on him and tackles him onto the mattress, one of those quicksilver moves of his that demonstrates the depressing scope of his wasted potential, if only he would use it for something more than bar fights and street brawls.

Eren crawls on top of him while the room is still spinning and seize his mouth again, kissing Jean so hard that Jean tastes blood on his lips. He's straddling Jean's hips, which makes it easy to reach down and wrap his hand around their dicks and stroke them together, at least until Eren slaps his hand away. He's like a wizard; Jean doesn't even know when Eren had time to grab the tube of slick gel and a condom without his noticing it, but there they are in his hands. He groans, closing his eyes and shuddering when Eren rolls the condom down his dick, straining into the roughness of his hand. He groans again when Eren fills his palm with lube and grips his dick, jerking him until Jean can't help rocking into his fist, panting with the pleasure knotting at the base of his spine. "Jesus, Jaeger," he says, hoarse, and pries his eyes open to see Eren leaning over him, wearing a bloody smile.

Eren raises himself up and lowers himself down on Jean's dick, and not slowly, either. Jean's vision goes white as Eren opens up around him, blazingly hot and far too tight—Jesus fucking _Christ_, Eren hasn't prepped himself at all. It's all Jean can do not to come then and there. He reaches for Eren, all unseeing, and clutches at his back as Eren growls against his mouth, the sound thin and breathless. Before Jean is ready—before he can even _think_ of being ready—Eren is moving, fucking himself on Jean's dick, setting a brutally hard rhythm, a punishing one.

None of them, not even Mikasa or Armin, has ever been able to convince Eren that he doesn't need to be punished. Jean doesn't know if anyone else is even still trying.

He hangs onto Eren, probably leaving scratches on his back, and fucks Eren, moving with him and groaning with the effort of not letting himself come, until Eren jerks against him and comes with a bitten-off curse. Then Jean lets go, his back coming off the bed as orgasm shakes him open, utterly merciless.

Jean is only dimly conscious in the aftermath of coming so hard—it's going on two in the morning by now, at least, and he's always sleepy after sex—but he's aware of Eren's weight slumped against his chest and the rasp of Eren's breath against his ear and then, eventually, the way Eren pulls off of him. He takes care of the condom on his way out of Jean's bed. Jean mumbles, "No smoking," when he realizes where Eren's going.

"Go to hell," Eren says, amiable, and lights up anyway.

Jean sighs, resigned, and stirs himself enough to roll onto his side as Eren climbs back into bed and leans against the headboard. "Set me on fire and I'll kick your sorry ass, Eren." Eren snickers at him. "I _will_."

"Go to sleep, Kirschstein."

He doesn't take orders from Eren—he _doesn't_—so Jean cracks an eye open and squints up at him. "Why is it always me you call?" he asks, with the fuzzy thought that really, all things considered, it ought to be Mikasa handling Eren's messes, or Armin when he's in town.

Eren doesn't respond and goes on smoking, tapping the ash into the ashtray that Jean keeps solely for his sake (though he will never admit to it). Eventually Jean surrenders and closes his eyes, letting himself slide all the way under.

He's never sure, afterwards, whether Eren's murmured, "Because you always answer," is something he really hears or if it's just something he dreams instead. Jean doesn't raise the question again and keeps on answering those late-night phone calls from Eren anyway. But really, though, what the hell else is he supposed to do?

**end**

And thus I continue my tradition of having the first thing I write in a fandom be porn.

Comments are always lovely!


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